About Moira Marquis

Moira Marquis is the Senior Manager of the Freewrite Project at PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. She has a PhD in Literature from UNC Chapel Hill and has taught English and history in secondary and higher education. She has worked with books to prison programs and tutored incarcerated people. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (UGA Press 2024) and lead author of the PEN America report, “Reading Between the Bars: An In-Depth Look at Carceral Censorship” being released October 26, 2023.

Visual Description: This four-part collage is made up of copies of denial forms, appeal forms and other prison paperwork that create the bureaucratic barrier to communication. These are interspersed with excerpts from narratives submitted by incarcerated people explaining their struggles with censorship. An image of a book turning into a bird is painted with black and white acrylic paint and gold leaf on top of the collaged items.